XP and 7 were just the same old Windows with different UIs and a bit of an upgrade. Something to base your business on, but nothing to provide anything for the future.
Its like saying IBM did well selling a mainframe, sure once upon a time they did that and made huge fortunes, today, they don't.
MS is stuck in a rut of not wanting to improve, that's the problem. For them.
not really. QML is like HTML or XAML. Its a layout language that allows you to specify where things go and their properties.
It then also allows you to add bit of code ("code behind" in WPF terms) that is written in javascript to perform activity. Using javascript for this is a good thing, its not particularly slow given that it isn't generally going to be used for anything other than simple stuff (you do not want to write your entire application in QML+js) and acts as a glue to call the underlying program logic that is written in C++. The fact that your QML-based controls look just like any other control to the underlying C++ program is really excellent.
So, if you're coding WPF for example, you often see monolithic crappy apps where everything is stuffed into the UI layer simply because WPF allows you to put your C# logic underneath the XAML, with HTML you see the javascript put in the UI layer because you have little choice with a disconnected UI on the web, but with QtQuick you get the best of all worlds being able to write quick and easy glue with a properly defined UI back-end.
And the UI layer is fast and doesn't have all the perf problems WPF has, so maybe MS should buy it to replace WPF for Metro - Nokia's selling everything else and it would be an excellent replacement:)
Sure QML is the definition langauge used for layout, but it is an integral part of Qt Quick, so when a user presses a button, a bit of javascript can be associated with that to perform some actions. Hence js IS executed on user actions using this system.
I'm just reading the basic tutorial and it shows a bit of javascript associated with a mouse over event.
meanwhile a/. story about how cool new QML support in KDE is gets 25 comments, while this one about how shit GNOME is gets several hundred.
I guess we're all into complaining way more than doing something about it. Try the KDE article, you might be pleasantly surprised how good Qt Quick is.
I can't really answer that, though in my experience any declarative system has to be converted to old-fashioned native code and that always incurs some overhead. However, for a plain old GUI you're not going to see anything noticeable, and Qt quick has support for openGL and other 3d gfx that I would imagine just passes-through the relevant fast bits to the underlying system.
They sold all the stock didn't they - to greedy investors who thought it'd go shooting up the day after IPO and they could make a killing flogging their stock (which I think all the institutions did), or stupid investors who thought that FB is the new paradigm and would take over the world's communications.
Either way, who cares? The only ones I see whining are those who bought the stock expecting to make easy money. The IPO price was obviously set at the right price as there was enough demand.
As for FB itself, it's still a private company, old Zucker didn't want any pesky shareholders (ie company owners) voting on what to do so all that stock is (IIRC) non-voting. So apart from a huge pile of cash taken from the stupid and/or greedy, nothings changed.
yeah, it makes a lot of sense. There's nothing wrong with another supported Linux distro in the datacentre, and all those companies that require supported stuff can have Linux running their favourite DB (Oracle DB is good to be fair) and not install it on Windows like has been happening a lot. If they say "Linux is the preferred (or best) option" then Microsoft-only customers will start to get over their obsession and look at this alternative, and hopefully be pleasantly surprised.
As for paid-for ksplice updates, this is what companies do. Its fair enough. If you want free, then live with a quick reboot when you update the kernel - its not that big a deal. I'd like to see dtrace better installed for non-Oracle boxes though, but that's the way it goes.
I don't think of this as competing with RedHat, this is competing with Microsoft, trying to get Oracle delivered with their own OS makes things cheaper for Oracle's support teams, and makes Oracle a little bit more cost effective (which they need when Microsoft practically gives their DB away if you buy their OS)
In fact, there is a good reason to go with KDE for Windows users... this is from 2009 where a couple of guys from ZDNet Australia took a KDE distro out and told passersby that it was the new Windows 7.....
They got good responses, looks like a) normal people can't tell the difference / don't know the difference. b) would be quite happy with a KDE-based Linux distro.
And then there's RedHat's OpenShift that appears to be free forever as long as you don't need much power. I guess that might change if it gets real popular, but then real popular should mean they have a lot of paying customers to subsidise the freebie option.
I'd hope that people realise that web apps are fine for LoB apps, if you're entering data and getting results, these are fine. Some javascript libraries give fine performance for this kind of stuff (network latency considered), but when it comes to game-style performance, you need something more native. I wonder if webgl can step up to give us this kind of perf, but if it cannot then any webapp will just not be suitable for low-latency, fast response applications.
Of course, this means WebGL libraries are needed to make development of these types of app practical.
Of course, it depends on the framework you're using - WPF for example is a "native" platform for UI development, but it is worse than web apps for performance especially now MS is using Direct2D for IE rendering.
Um.. you realize that every Android application is written in Java, and there are quite a few exceptional Android applications.
I think you'd be surprised at how many of those are written using the NDK. Download addon detector and look for yourself (its an app typically used to check an app doesn't include some dodgy notification-based ad networks, but it also shows you a load of other interesting info). 80% of the games I have on my phone are NDK based, they're the ones that are responsive and fast.
I guess the kind of women who join the army aren't the kind that sit around on your couch eating ice cream out of tubs followed by a plate of doughnuts, and so more likely to have smaller breasts that can be flattened enough to fit - you might have more difficulty fitting your armour if you're a man shaped like Arnold at his peak, certainly he had bigger and more prominent chest area than a lot of women I've known.
Well, they have to persuade you to buy into Metro somehow, and how else but saying "man, that old crap we did, how crap! But we did it right this time, look how cool it all is".
ArsTechnica did a much better piece about how its not so much how much better Win8 is, but how much of that goodness is put into Metro apps rather than old desktop apps.
As for WPF, its fine for LoB apps, but TBH those were perfectly catered for with winforms, and winforms were a bit easier to work with - no nasty interfaces, loads of property-laden objects, and really crufty binding expressions in the XAML, Winforms were so simple in comparison and did everything your LoB app wanted, but I guess MS couldn't have sold you the new VS and Blend to work with WPF without saying "man, that old crap we did, how crap! But we did it right this time, look how cool it all is".
I guess so, but then Baidu has had quite a bit of growth (60%) in its ad revenues recently. That said, they're going into smartphones too so maybe just copying what Google does is a business model:)
I do, occasionally. If I'm on a site that's giving me free stuff that I like, I will click on the odd ad just to say thanks. Depends how intrusive they are (most blocked by adblock anyway) and how much I think the site wants me to click them.
and there's nothing that's going to stop your boss from firing you once you get to a certain age and replace you with some younger, cooler, but most definitely cheaper wage-slave anyway, and then you'll realise the whole thing is a bit of a sham.
Not a lot that can be done about it really, the boss wants cheap labour and you want more money. I think the end result is a huge programmer shortage and a large benefit to off-shoring IT workers.
Of course, your company and yourself could adopt a more progressive policy of long-term tenure of employment where people grow with a company, are trained to keep up with new technology and increase experience with the company's systems and business. But no-one's going to do that when there are short-term profits to be made!
whiteboards.... you were sitting down at a whiteboard that was a full arm's stretch away and roughly level with your shoulder?
No, didn't think so. Its one thing to use a vertical surface when you're generally keeping your arm at a downward angle with occasional and short horizontal movements, all with your elbow bent. Its quite another to stick your arm out and keep it there for any kind of extended period. Try it now, you'll notice it getting heavier after just a minute.
As for fingerprints, I guess it's different with a small, bright device. I guess monitors could be as good... except you can't easily breathe on them and wipe them clean, instead you'll be smearing grease around, or keeping a whole heap of cleaning fluids to hand.
In any case, I just think its pointless, desktop UI should be ergonomically designed around desktop users, not phone users. Why they couldn't make 2 slightly different UIs beats me.
You've forgotten that in-app purchases make lots of money, it's a "holy grail" of businesses selling software. No longer do they have to worry about piracy and those nasty crackers eating into their profits, or of having to release teaser CDs, or even of having to worry about installing licence-checking software.
Now everything is free, except when you want to use it, and that gives them to opportunity to squeeze a lot more cash out of you than before. When a DVD was a single one-time $30 outlay, they lost money, now it's a $5 here, $5 there and eventually a £1500 bill
from that link:
I have a particular hatred of Outfit7's talking characters, whose apps' screens are minefields of "buy things!" buttons, but the nadir is probably Beeline Interactive's Smurfs' Village, a free app that includes in-app purchases such as a "wagon of smurfberries" for just £69.99. How do they sleep?
So yes, this has taken a huge turn for the worse. Money does that to things.
it's all relative. The problem with traditional solar panels is there's a limited area you can place them - typically on the roof, and often at an angle to get the most sunlight, thus reducing the number of panels further.
But if you look at most office blocks, they're practically all glass. Even at 1/5th efficiency of traditional panels, if you can put at least 5 times as much area of them in, then you will get more power out. Ratio of window to roof on a modern skyscraper towerblock is a lot more than 5:1.
But, you have to factor in the cost of the film too - if it costs $1m per sq foot, then you won't be using much of it. It would have to cost enough to recoup the outlay in generated power over a few years to be commerically worthwhile. For example, 10 years to recoup investment is probably too long as I doubt they'll last.
oh lord no, but gbjbaanb is an alias that doesn't completely reflect on me... in many respects it is my "online personality" that I've built up over the years and so doesn't actually give me anonymity - if you see a post by gbjbaanb online, chances are it's me (after all, who'd pinch this alias name... yeah, someone will now:) ).
but you don't know many things about my real life and who I am from that alias. Admittedly I don't know how much linkage from that to my other accounts there is, but TBH I don't care so much - this alias isn't designed to be anonymous, unlike a couple of I have for certain activities (eg posting to non-tech sites, or to sites with political commentary).
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XP and 7 were just the same old Windows with different UIs and a bit of an upgrade. Something to base your business on, but nothing to provide anything for the future.
Its like saying IBM did well selling a mainframe, sure once upon a time they did that and made huge fortunes, today, they don't.
MS is stuck in a rut of not wanting to improve, that's the problem. For them.
not really. QML is like HTML or XAML. Its a layout language that allows you to specify where things go and their properties.
It then also allows you to add bit of code ("code behind" in WPF terms) that is written in javascript to perform activity. Using javascript for this is a good thing, its not particularly slow given that it isn't generally going to be used for anything other than simple stuff (you do not want to write your entire application in QML+js) and acts as a glue to call the underlying program logic that is written in C++. The fact that your QML-based controls look just like any other control to the underlying C++ program is really excellent.
So, if you're coding WPF for example, you often see monolithic crappy apps where everything is stuffed into the UI layer simply because WPF allows you to put your C# logic underneath the XAML, with HTML you see the javascript put in the UI layer because you have little choice with a disconnected UI on the web, but with QtQuick you get the best of all worlds being able to write quick and easy glue with a properly defined UI back-end.
And the UI layer is fast and doesn't have all the perf problems WPF has, so maybe MS should buy it to replace WPF for Metro - Nokia's selling everything else and it would be an excellent replacement :)
uh? what?
Sure QML is the definition langauge used for layout, but it is an integral part of Qt Quick, so when a user presses a button, a bit of javascript can be associated with that to perform some actions. Hence js IS executed on user actions using this system.
I'm just reading the basic tutorial and it shows a bit of javascript associated with a mouse over event.
meanwhile a /. story about how cool new QML support in KDE is gets 25 comments, while this one about how shit GNOME is gets several hundred.
I guess we're all into complaining way more than doing something about it. Try the KDE article, you might be pleasantly surprised how good Qt Quick is.
I can't really answer that, though in my experience any declarative system has to be converted to old-fashioned native code and that always incurs some overhead. However, for a plain old GUI you're not going to see anything noticeable, and Qt quick has support for openGL and other 3d gfx that I would imagine just passes-through the relevant fast bits to the underlying system.
There are QML tutorials available.
They sold all the stock didn't they - to greedy investors who thought it'd go shooting up the day after IPO and they could make a killing flogging their stock (which I think all the institutions did), or stupid investors who thought that FB is the new paradigm and would take over the world's communications.
Either way, who cares? The only ones I see whining are those who bought the stock expecting to make easy money. The IPO price was obviously set at the right price as there was enough demand.
As for FB itself, it's still a private company, old Zucker didn't want any pesky shareholders (ie company owners) voting on what to do so all that stock is (IIRC) non-voting. So apart from a huge pile of cash taken from the stupid and/or greedy, nothings changed.
yeah, it makes a lot of sense. There's nothing wrong with another supported Linux distro in the datacentre, and all those companies that require supported stuff can have Linux running their favourite DB (Oracle DB is good to be fair) and not install it on Windows like has been happening a lot. If they say "Linux is the preferred (or best) option" then Microsoft-only customers will start to get over their obsession and look at this alternative, and hopefully be pleasantly surprised.
As for paid-for ksplice updates, this is what companies do. Its fair enough. If you want free, then live with a quick reboot when you update the kernel - its not that big a deal. I'd like to see dtrace better installed for non-Oracle boxes though, but that's the way it goes.
I don't think of this as competing with RedHat, this is competing with Microsoft, trying to get Oracle delivered with their own OS makes things cheaper for Oracle's support teams, and makes Oracle a little bit more cost effective (which they need when Microsoft practically gives their DB away if you buy their OS)
In fact, there is a good reason to go with KDE for Windows users... this is from 2009 where a couple of guys from ZDNet Australia took a KDE distro out and told passersby that it was the new Windows 7.....
They got good responses, looks like a) normal people can't tell the difference / don't know the difference. b) would be quite happy with a KDE-based Linux distro.
And then there's RedHat's OpenShift that appears to be free forever as long as you don't need much power. I guess that might change if it gets real popular, but then real popular should mean they have a lot of paying customers to subsidise the freebie option.
I'd hope that people realise that web apps are fine for LoB apps, if you're entering data and getting results, these are fine. Some javascript libraries give fine performance for this kind of stuff (network latency considered), but when it comes to game-style performance, you need something more native. I wonder if webgl can step up to give us this kind of perf, but if it cannot then any webapp will just not be suitable for low-latency, fast response applications.
Of course, this means WebGL libraries are needed to make development of these types of app practical.
Of course, it depends on the framework you're using - WPF for example is a "native" platform for UI development, but it is worse than web apps for performance especially now MS is using Direct2D for IE rendering.
well, yes.. but they also said that they shunned 3rd party app platforms because they are almost universally crap.
Um.. you realize that every Android application is written in Java, and there are quite a few exceptional Android applications.
I think you'd be surprised at how many of those are written using the NDK. Download addon detector and look for yourself (its an app typically used to check an app doesn't include some dodgy notification-based ad networks, but it also shows you a load of other interesting info). 80% of the games I have on my phone are NDK based, they're the ones that are responsive and fast.
it depends how big they are in the first place, so its hard to make a completely general statement.
I guess the kind of women who join the army aren't the kind that sit around on your couch eating ice cream out of tubs followed by a plate of doughnuts, and so more likely to have smaller breasts that can be flattened enough to fit - you might have more difficulty fitting your armour if you're a man shaped like Arnold at his peak, certainly he had bigger and more prominent chest area than a lot of women I've known.
no, you're not interpreting it wrong.. non-Metro stuff will not see any of these improvements.
Ars did a much better piece about it.
There's a nice technical blog about how bad WPF is for rendering stuff, and how Silverlight is even worse (most Silverlight rendering is done via the CPU). Fun reading.
Well, they have to persuade you to buy into Metro somehow, and how else but saying "man, that old crap we did, how crap! But we did it right this time, look how cool it all is".
ArsTechnica did a much better piece about how its not so much how much better Win8 is, but how much of that goodness is put into Metro apps rather than old desktop apps.
As for WPF, its fine for LoB apps, but TBH those were perfectly catered for with winforms, and winforms were a bit easier to work with - no nasty interfaces, loads of property-laden objects, and really crufty binding expressions in the XAML, Winforms were so simple in comparison and did everything your LoB app wanted, but I guess MS couldn't have sold you the new VS and Blend to work with WPF without saying "man, that old crap we did, how crap! But we did it right this time, look how cool it all is".
I guess so, but then Baidu has had quite a bit of growth (60%) in its ad revenues recently. That said, they're going into smartphones too so maybe just copying what Google does is a business model :)
I do, occasionally. If I'm on a site that's giving me free stuff that I like, I will click on the odd ad just to say thanks. Depends how intrusive they are (most blocked by adblock anyway) and how much I think the site wants me to click them.
and there's nothing that's going to stop your boss from firing you once you get to a certain age and replace you with some younger, cooler, but most definitely cheaper wage-slave anyway, and then you'll realise the whole thing is a bit of a sham.
Not a lot that can be done about it really, the boss wants cheap labour and you want more money. I think the end result is a huge programmer shortage and a large benefit to off-shoring IT workers.
Of course, your company and yourself could adopt a more progressive policy of long-term tenure of employment where people grow with a company, are trained to keep up with new technology and increase experience with the company's systems and business. But no-one's going to do that when there are short-term profits to be made!
whiteboards.... you were sitting down at a whiteboard that was a full arm's stretch away and roughly level with your shoulder?
No, didn't think so. Its one thing to use a vertical surface when you're generally keeping your arm at a downward angle with occasional and short horizontal movements, all with your elbow bent. Its quite another to stick your arm out and keep it there for any kind of extended period. Try it now, you'll notice it getting heavier after just a minute.
As for fingerprints, I guess it's different with a small, bright device. I guess monitors could be as good... except you can't easily breathe on them and wipe them clean, instead you'll be smearing grease around, or keeping a whole heap of cleaning fluids to hand.
In any case, I just think its pointless, desktop UI should be ergonomically designed around desktop users, not phone users. Why they couldn't make 2 slightly different UIs beats me.
You've forgotten that in-app purchases make lots of money, it's a "holy grail" of businesses selling software. No longer do they have to worry about piracy and those nasty crackers eating into their profits, or of having to release teaser CDs, or even of having to worry about installing licence-checking software.
Now everything is free, except when you want to use it, and that gives them to opportunity to squeeze a lot more cash out of you than before. When a DVD was a single one-time $30 outlay, they lost money, now it's a $5 here, $5 there and eventually a £1500 bill
from that link:
I have a particular hatred of Outfit7's talking characters, whose apps' screens are minefields of "buy things!" buttons, but the nadir is probably Beeline Interactive's Smurfs' Village, a free app that includes in-app purchases such as a "wagon of smurfberries" for just £69.99. How do they sleep?
So yes, this has taken a huge turn for the worse. Money does that to things.
yes, the Vast Machine is a reality :(
Mind you, they still haven't really got to associating real names with real people yet - not if my names A N Mouse!
it's all relative. The problem with traditional solar panels is there's a limited area you can place them - typically on the roof, and often at an angle to get the most sunlight, thus reducing the number of panels further.
But if you look at most office blocks, they're practically all glass. Even at 1/5th efficiency of traditional panels, if you can put at least 5 times as much area of them in, then you will get more power out. Ratio of window to roof on a modern skyscraper towerblock is a lot more than 5:1.
But, you have to factor in the cost of the film too - if it costs $1m per sq foot, then you won't be using much of it. It would have to cost enough to recoup the outlay in generated power over a few years to be commerically worthwhile. For example, 10 years to recoup investment is probably too long as I doubt they'll last.
Fund raiser car washes... you just have to do them like this
as for the guys who wash your windscreen and demand $2 later.. like having a clean windscreen is going to stop them.
oh lord no, but gbjbaanb is an alias that doesn't completely reflect on me... in many respects it is my "online personality" that I've built up over the years and so doesn't actually give me anonymity - if you see a post by gbjbaanb online, chances are it's me (after all, who'd pinch this alias name... yeah, someone will now :) ).
but you don't know many things about my real life and who I am from that alias. Admittedly I don't know how much linkage from that to my other accounts there is, but TBH I don't care so much - this alias isn't designed to be anonymous, unlike a couple of I have for certain activities (eg posting to non-tech sites, or to sites with political commentary).